


our love keeps the things it finds

by mayleavestars



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Multi, Post-Canon, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, assorted mental health issues on both parts, but canon read against the text. death of the author out the wazoo, compulsory heterosexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 20:38:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12825603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayleavestars/pseuds/mayleavestars
Summary: It’s comfortable, what they have, whatever else it is; some part of her doesn’t want to probe its edges too extensively. The Counselor in her, though, can’t help but probe just a little.War-time hookups in peacetime; or, how to end a relationship based in mutual loneliness.





	our love keeps the things it finds

When Ezri Dax wakes up, the memory of Lenara Kahn’s lips is fresh on hers.

She turns sideways into the pillow, away from Julian, and shudders quietly. The routine she’s established over the weeks kicks in: clutching the sheets silently and reestablishing herself within her lifetime, within her acceptable range of partners. Within her ongoing relationship. _My name is Ezri Dax, and these are my past lives._

She’d never felt these insistent resurgences at such a level in her brief encounters with a few of Jadzia’s assorted past lovers. One could make the argument, of course, that it was hard to feel lingers of a past passion for men with transparent skulls. Still, though, the discrepancy is present. Even Worf’s allure had never been difficult to resist; in the end, they’d only succumbed to it on the brink of death.

It’s never Torias and Kahn, either; those memories are easy to separate out with the rest of the past-lives baggage. But the amorous encounters of Jadzia Dax — no, only about half of said encounters — somehow overstay their welcome past the rest of the memories.

Beside her, Julian stirs; opens his eyes; smiles, briefly. “No sudden onset of hilarity this morning?”

Something freezes inside Ezri. Yesterday, for the first time in ages, Ezri Dax had opened her eyes but it was Jadzia who’d seen Julian beside her and been overcome with a wave of awareness at how ridiculous it all was. _Julian!_ Of all people! Of all the people on the station, of all the people in the galaxy!

Ezri was curled up on the floor by the time Julian had woken up, laughing uncontrollably and crying at the same time. She hadn’t had the heart to explain it to him fully, letting him file it away under the general category of ‘Trill-adjacent identity issues’. He’d held her, afterward, and it hadn’t felt like Jadzia remembered it: hollower, somehow, disconnected.

That’s how most things feel, these days.

It isn’t _fair_ , Ezri thinks now as she stands up and requests two Tarkalean teas from the replicator. The woman hadn’t even wanted Julian, not in the capacity that Ezri wants him, and yet her memories of him feel easier, more whole, than Ezri’s lived presence.

“Do you ever feel we’re missing something?” she asks him as she hands over the cup, and instantly regrets it. Obviously they’re missing something. Ezri’s missing an entire framework for understanding herself; she has eight extra selves she doesn’t know what to do with, and she’s missing the time to figure them out at her own pace. (In the mornings, she misses the brightness in Leeta’s eyes, the give in Lenara’s lips, the confidence with which Jadzia had made those advances — _Jadzia owned herself_ , Garak had said.)

Julian’s missing two of the people he’s been closest to on the station, perhaps in his entire life. Ezri thinks, in her lowest moments, that she’s a poor replacement for the third.

They’re all missing things, these days.

He looks at her, hair mussed by the blue Starfleet undershirt he’s just pulled over his head. Even in these intimate morning moments, his expression is guarded.

“I think you’d do well to be more specific,” he says wryly, but his face shows no sign of a smile. She’s not sure when she’s last seen him smile genuinely — a part of her suspects, uncharitably, that it’s in Jadzia’s memories.

“I know,” she sighs now. “I’m sorry, Julian, it was a silly question. It’s just the counselor in me, I guess. I don’t like seeing things going badly.”

“We’ve survived a war,” he says blithely, fastening his uniform jacket. “It’s going to take a while for things to go exactly right. At least I’ve got you, right?”

He sounds so genuine when he says it, even if his smile’s half-hearted. And Ezri genuinely believes she makes him happy. He makes her happy, too. It’s comfortable, what they have, whatever else it is; some part of her doesn’t want to probe its edges too extensively.

The aforementioned counselor, though, can’t help but probe just a little.

He leans forward and kisses her lightly as he picks up a stack of PADDs from his table. “I’ll see you at lunch,” he calls, and walks out the door.

It’s comfortable, it’s domestic, it’s unlike anything Ezri’s ever had before in her life. _I’m sorry, this is still so weird_ , says Jadzia, _so where’s the passion?_ , asks Curzon, _are you two okay?_ asks Audrid.

Ezri doesn’t have answers for any of them.

 -

The strange thing is that she remembers their first time being good. Unlike every other encounter of the sort, unlike Worf and whatever short-lived engagements there’d been back on the _Destiny_ , it was exciting at the very least. When they couldn’t recapture that feeling in the weeks that followed, she thought at first that it was the cognitive dissonance of sex with one of Jadzia’s few exclusively platonic friends.

She wonders now if, had it not preceded the Battle of Cardassia, their sex life would have been dull from the start. She remembers a series of gratifyingly violent collisions between them — lips, bodies, hands. She remembers desperation, and uncharacteristic reticence from both parties, and the paralyzing knowledge that they might die the next day.

And she remembers waking up the next morning, and the relief of having someone next to her at all, and realizing that she didn’t want to die at all, that she desperately wanted to have something after all this ended. She remembers wanting it to end.

At the time, she had recognized Julian’s willing presence and his resolve to overcome a desperate loneliness. (The next day, she had watched his expression as the _Defiant_ took off from Cardassia and felt her first suspicions that living will have carried consequences.)

She tried not to think about her boyfriend in these terms, as if engaging with a patient, but Julian’s very nature seemed to demand it. In all fairness, of course, so did her own. A relationship built on mutual psychoanalysis — how romantic.

When they’d met, she’d told him firmly not to flirt with her; he’d told her she had Jadzia’s eyes, which was nonsense; she’d told him that if it weren’t for Worf it would have been him, which was nonsense of an even more egregious nature.

For a bit, she’d felt guilty, as if she’d built the very foundations of this relationship on false pretenses. In Quark’s, a week after the war ended, she’d tentatively brought it up.

“I’ve wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

He’d looked at her in surprize. “What for?”

“I lied, that day. Not on purpose, not to hurt you or anything, but I’d just been joined and it had felt like the thing to say, even though obviously it wasn’t. But when I said it, that if it weren’t for Worf —”

“— It would have been me.” Even then, she’d been growing aware that Julian Bashir’s genuine smiles were far rarer than she’d initially assumed — than Jadzia’s memories had led her to believe. Ezri had never known the dogged, naive man that her memories tell her existed seven years ago.

Conversely, Jadzia had never known a Julian recovering from her death.

Even so, he made an attempt at a smile. “Don’t look so worried. I figured, eventually. If she’d wanted to... Well, rest assured she would have.”

Ezri had still looked worried, evidently, because he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry. It was a very kind thing to say.”

She found her voice at this new piece of nonsense. “No, it wasn’t.”

“No, I suppose it wasn’t.”

They sat in silence for a long while.

“As long as we’re doing this, it wasn’t kind to say I had Jadzia’s eyes,” Ezri said at last.

“It wasn’t. I’m sorry.”

“I suppose we’re even,” Ezri said at last. “Julian, I’m —”

“Don’t,” Julian said quickly. His hand was still on hers. “When we had that conversation, neither of us understood for real what being a joined Trill meant. Not in practice, at least. But I think we understand each other now.”

It was a good conversation as their conversations went, for all the uncomfortable undercurrents that had been present beneath their words. All the same, she finds his final statement laughable.

-

It doesn’t come as a surprize when she sees it, but her stomach still clenches a little. She’s off-duty; Julian isn’t, not for another two hours. She considers going to see him now, but something in her blanches at the idea. She shouldn’t have seen the PADD anyway, and so she waits.

When they’re having dinner that night, she asks, “Why don’t you just visit him?”

He looks up; his expression is briefly caught off-guard, and it’s strangely satisfying. “Miles?” he asks, and Ezri feels a twinge of annoyance.

“Miles, too, if you want,” she concedes. “But you know I wasn’t talking about him.”

Julian’s performative bafflement works its effects a moment later, and she bursts out,”I just saw the PADD by accident, you were looking up relief positions on Cardassia — ?”

His face clears of the confusion, replaced by an unwarranted look of defeat. “Oh, that,” he mutters glumly. “I wasn’t actually considering it —not even a short position, it would interfere with my work here.” His face brightens a little. “Plus, I wouldn’t want to leave you all by yourself.”

She rolls her eyes. “I think I can handle myself for a few months.”

“I know you can.” His hands are fiddling with the fork as he transitions into the soft, morose half-truths that are typical to this topic of conversation. “I guess partly it’s that —I’d want to see him, and I’m not at all sure he’d want to see me. He’d tell me he doesn’t need my, you know, my smug Federation what-have-you —”

“That’s never stopped you before,” Ezri points out, not sure why she’s poking so relentlessly at this unspoken shared awareness. It’s that damned counselor instinct again, she supposes. There’s a million people between them, past lives and past lovers alike. Ezri may have more of them, but Julian’s have a way of making themselves known.

Her statement seems to frustrate Julian, as if he sees some picture in a far clearer light than she does. “That was before eight-hundred million of his people were killed, Ezri.”

Julian says it louder than she thinks he means to; around him, at the Replimat, their fellow diners look at them askance. Julian and Ezri tend to favor Quark’s; she wonders now if it’s because he’d rather keep this old haunt reserved for a very different entanglement.

Looking sheepish, he continues. “How do you know if you’re welcome in someone’s life after something like that happens, Ezri? The Federation started the Dominion War, technically, and in any case, if it were me, I think I’d blame damn well everyone.”

“He’s got better people to blame than _you_ ,” Ezri counters.

“All the same.”

Both of them are famed among their friends for never shutting up, and yet their relationship is framed by silences. When she tires of this one, she tentatively says, “I think it would be good for you to keep in touch with the two of them. My best friend’s — ascended to godhood, or something. And Odo’s in the Link, so think of what Kira must be going through, so I think in your place I’d keep in touch with people who are merely on another planet. I keep in touch with Worf, after all.”

“I talk to Miles all the time,” Julian says, and then, as if anticipating that she wouldn’t let it go at that, “and I’ve written to Garak, too.” Swallowing the rest of his I’danian spice pudding, he stands up. “I’m sorry, Ezri, but I’ve got some unfinished work. I’ll have to leave early.”

“Go ahead,” she says, leaning back in her chair. The flippant note in her tone of voice is unfamiliar to herself, but she likes the note of power she feels when she uses it.

As she sits at the table alone, finishing her dinner, she realizes there are better arguments she could have brought up. That, as often as Garak had disparaged Julian’s help, it’s been years since he outright rejected it. That regardless of the difficulty involved, Julian’s help would be good for Cardassia, and his presence would be good for Garak. That Julian Bashir, savior complex aside, worked best where he was genuinely needed, where a tangible difference was being made on a day-to-day basis.

She hadn’t said any of those things, though, and she thinks she knows why. As much as she feels filled, at times, with the edges of a solidifying realization that will put an end to this all sooner or later, a part of her relies on his presence all the same A part of her senses his need and reflects it back, a part of her likes chattering at one another and reenacting history she’d never learned in the holosuites.

If things went badly on Cardassia, Julian would only draw further into whatever stasis field he thinks he's cast around the two of them; if things went well, Ezri isn’t sure what would remain for her except for thoughts she’s too afraid to follow through on.

-

The first time Ezri had teased Julian for his ‘annihilation fantasies’ seems like a million years ago. Now, he’s shot by an invading Persian, and Ezri wonders if he considers death erotic or their sexual encounters deadly, because his physicality, his briefly peaceful expression, is so similar —

“Computer, freeze program,” her shaking voice says before her brain catches up with the significance of the thought, and the battle falls silent around them. Julian indignantly opens his mouth to speak, but she lifts her palms to silence him.

“No, I’m sorry, Julian.” As she says the words, she feels a resurgence of her childhood inability to get angry at someone without crying; she suppresses it. “I’m a counselor, damn it. I have to draw a line somewhere, and I can’t endorse this.”

“Annihilation fantasies?” asks Julian teasingly, and she _hates_ it, she hates his attempts to pass these things off as jokes, hates him pretending that it’s all fine, and that’s it — that’s the common thread — he’s pretending, he’s pretending all the time — she’s letting things lie, maybe, she’s putting off inevitable facts, but he’s experienced the inevitable and now he’s pretending he hasn’t.

She can’t help it; she vocalizes a tiny sob before wiping her eyes and glaring at him. “You’ve known all along, haven’t you? No, don’t say anything, you know you don’t love me, and you know I don’t love you, you know we’re carrying things over from past lives, you know it’s not working and you’ve just, what — not been talking about it, all this time?”

In Jadzia’s earliest memories of the man, you can read his face like an open book. Here and now, his expression briefly betrays a panic that Ezri only registers because it’s her job. “What are you talking about, Ezri?”

“Don’t do this,” she whispers. “Don’t. The gig’s over, this isn’t one of your holosuite programs. If you want to pretend the war’s still going, if you want to move in here, I can't stop you. But don’t you dare bring me into it — don’t you dare incorporate me into whatever denial you’ve constructed. I’m a real person, this is real life, and if you want to be loved the way we’ve been pretending you love each other…”

Her voice can’t help but catch at that. “Unlike me, you’ve _actually got someone_. 353-mark-220, Julian. Don’t pretend he wouldn’t take you back. I haven’t got anyone to fall back on; maybe that’s why I believed we were really in love. But you’ve got so many places to run to, and if you’re too much of a coward to face them, that’s your jurisdiction. But move forward, Julian, damn it. I’m not your coping mechanism, or your second chance with Jadzia, or whatever the hell else you’ve ever believed I was.”

He’s standing there, stunned. She wants him to say something; wants to know her words made an impact; wants to be able to talk about this to Worf, to Benjamin, to Norvo, to anyone.

At last, he says, “Maybe I’ve just been hoping we’d work out.”

It’s a last-ditch attempt; she knows this, and she knows that he knows this, and she knows they both know it’s over. Dimly aware that she’ll regret this within moments, she gathers her courage and gives him a truth where he’s offered none.

“I’m a lesbian, Julian. I wouldn’t count on it.”

She uses the Standard term instead of the rough Trill equivalent; she hopes it will bypass the translator, hopes Julian will hear her say it in an accented voice and understand she means it. 

-

By the time Julian finds her the next day, she’s panicking.

He sits down across from Ezri in her office; she’s got an hour in between appointments, one of which she’s thinking of moving - she’s inadequate like this, inefficient. She’d gone ahead and done it, for the first time in her life, and it had felt like taking a plunge; after the fact, it feels stupid.

Trill are supposed to be above this kind of thing — joined Trill, anyway. Trill are supposed to lack doubt, to communicate directly. If you’re not sure who you are, any past self-conception falls apart at the whims of the symbiont. She’d learned about it in school, and never thought she’d need to apply this to herself.

At last, he says, “I wouldn’t have stayed if I’d known that was the issue.”

She hopes it’s the truth; in any case, for her peace of mind, she chooses to accept the statement as such. “I know.”

“To be frank, I didn’t know Trill tended to have gender preferences? Oh, that sounded bad, didn’t it —”

Somewhat, but he’s doing his best, and she deigns to be kind to him in turn. “No, I mean... You’d only known Jadzia, and you’d heard about Curzon before that. They certainly didn’t. A lot of us don’t. Certainly, a lot of us who do choose not to get Joined, or know we have to train extra hard — compartmentalize. You have to reconcile the real attractions of past hosts with — with what you want from life, you know?”

“Training which you didn’t get,” he understands, and Ezri sighs.

“Training that I didn’t get.”

She closes her eyes briefly and gives up; she might as well spill this to someone. After all the time Jadzia had spent soothing Julian’s emotional problems, she thinks uncharitably, he owes her one. “A week before we were called over to bring the Dax symbiont back to Trill,” she said quietly, “I’d started on a letter to my mother. We don’t talk much, which I guess you remember —”

He just nods, and so she keeps going.

“Well, I wrote — _now that we’re not talking, I want you to know that I’m never bringing home a nice boy, never going to run the family business, never going to be the daughter you’re so proud of_ , you know, the usual. Because that month I’d just had this subspace conversation with her, last one before I was joined — I told her this lie about a crush on Ensign Finok, and I didn’t know why I was lying but I knew I was. We had this fight — it’s not important why. But I didn’t send that letter, The next day, I looked over it and thought, oh, just a rebellion thing, just another way for Ezri to get back at her mother, but I was getting somewhere, you know? I was going through some kind of thought process.” Despite her best efforts, her voices catches.

“And then you got joined with Dax,” Julian says softly. It’s his most sympathetic voice; she’d first heard him use it with Garak, right after the airlock situation. She’s alarmed at the idea that there could be any equivalency between their two emotional states.

“Daxes love so much,” Ezri whispers. “Curzon and Jadzia particularly, but all the others too. But the people I got to be around were the ones Jadzia loved, and she loved so goddamn much. She loved Benjamin, and Nerys, and Worf, and Quark, and — and you.” She shakes her head at his sceptical expression. “No, she did. Whatever nonsense you’ve had in your head with regards to your relationship, she always loved you, she _always_ valued you. She didn’t blame you for her death, but she went out a bit angry at you anyway, remembering the situation with the Quickening, knowing some part of you would be _selfish_ enough to blame yourself.”

In the responding twitch of his face he looks briefly, blindingly alive.

“Oh, god,” he says, lowering his face into his hands. For a moment, they both sit there, still; she wonders idly if she’s gone too far, but then he looks up and his eyes are wet but he looks more present than Ezri ever remembers him being.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. “You’ve been more honest with me these past days than I’ve been with anyone in —”

“Months, yes,” she finishes. “I know.”

“I was ready to accept that anyone loved me, toward the end,” he said quietly. “You were so hopeful, so alive, compared to the rest of us.” She makes a face, and he laughs a little. “I know, I know. Awful. But you must know, I thought we were all about to die. I wanted to go out feeling loved, I guess.” He looks over his words and laughs in repulsion. 

“Oh, god, I’m —”

None of what Julian says is news to her; she’s kind enough not to bring up the debacle with Sarina Douglas, but it’s a symptom of the same desperate loneliness that had made him easy to latch on to. It was nice to feel needed by someone, and nice to need someone in return. It had been nice to reestablish herself, separate herself from Jadzia even while the Jadzia parts of her laughed in shocked disbelief.

She dreads her zhian’tara sometimes. While, objectively, she knows Jadzia will accept her for the person she is, she still sometimes has dreams where the first words out of the temporary host’s mouth are " _you slept with Julian Bashir?_ "

Julian is slumped in his chair, contemplating whatever wave of self-reproach his confession had brought on. Hesitantly, Ezri reaches over and squeezes his hand. “Hey, I’ve been there. It wasn’t my first case of ‘we’re-all-about-to-die’ sex, so to speak. Not even my first as Ezri.”

He cracks a smile. “Not my first, either.”

“I remember.”

Jadzia remembers, at least. 2374, the _Defiant_ , displacement from a home they’d both known for for five years. The thumps of relief in her chest every time Worf had appeared on the bridge of that ship. Seeing Julian and Garak snipe at each other with that funny Cardassian undertone, teasing him about it in the mess hall while Miles groaned affectionately.

Had it really only been two years?

He releases her hand, runs his own through his hair, and places his elbows on her desk. “I hope we’ll be friends one day, Ezri,” he said quietly. “I’ll understand if you don’t forgive me, but I really do value you. Really wish we’d met in a different context than this. I think we would have made good friends.”

“I think we would now,” she counters. “We just need time, is all. Some time apart, certainly, but I’ll keep in touch, and all.” She pauses. “I mean, or we’ll just talk, I didn’t mean to assume you’re leaving.”

“No, you assumed correctly.” He smiles slightly. “I’m sorting it out with Nerys and Starfleet, and then I’m leaving for Cardassia Prime. At least there I’ll be useful to people.”

“I know I told you to go a few weeks back, but I hope you know you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Ezri says; she’s been considering this. “It’s not going to be easy.”

“I'm aware, Counselor Dax,” says Julian, with a ghost of the smile Jadzia remembers him having. “But it’s some kind of step. I can’t stay static right now — everyone’s moving ahead, somehow, everyone’s found some element of themselves at least, and here I’ve been — just waiting for something to go right.” He laughs bitterly. “We fucked ourselves over, Ezri, didn’t we?”

“No,” she says gently. “The war fucked us over.”

It’s not the full truth. She’s guilty, she knows, of not letting herself investigate the shoddy center she’d suspected was present here. He’s guilty of something worse: of knowing it without the need for investigation, and of staying anyway due to some misguided need for love and its centricity. Nonetheless, when their eyes meet over Ezri’s desk, she feels they understand each other in much the same way Julian had once mistakenly said they did.

He stands up now — straighter — and leaves her office with only one glance over his shoulder. She moves her chair backward away from her desk, kicks her feet up, sends Jake a message asking if he’d like to have lunch tomorrow. The boy needs companionship, and she’s not going to let Benjamin down in that regard.

The world moves forward now; whatever stasis field they had has collapsed. In their own way, she knows, they will each come out of this alive.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the second fic I have ever exposed the world to so I'm very sorry if this is... secretly terrible
> 
> my fondest thanks to everyone who has written Jezri Hellfic before me and everyone who's put up with me sometimes blogging more about this mess than most ships I actually like
> 
> contrary to popular belief this isn't actually spitefic this is "katia recovers from what you leave behind by being really sad about these two" fic
> 
> the title is from "riches and wonders" by the mountain goats; the coordinates i got by control+f'ing "cardassia prime" on the memory alpha page for coordinates so let's hope they're correct


End file.
